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- All Subjects: Linguistics
Description
This study explores the online recruitment and mobilization of followers in a social movement. In this study, I identify and analyze how certain narratives were produced, distributed and recirculated online by a social movement organization that depicted players in the movement in ways that engaged followers in actions of advocacy and support. Also, I examine how particular narratives were taken up, negotiated, amplified, and distributed by online supporters who eventually become co-tellers of the narrative and ultimately advocates on behalf of the social movement. By examining a selection of media statements, open letters, protest speeches, blogs, videos and pictures, I show how online practices might contribute to inspiring and mobilizing action or responses from a large number of followers. Data include selected excerpts from an online social movement that began in Norway in 2015 and later gathered momentum and strength outside of Norway and Europe. This multi-modal analysis of digital practices demonstrates how collaboratively produced narratives (e.g., of suffering, sorrow, persecution or resilience) emerge and gain traction in the digital space, the relationship between the temporal and spatial dimensions of narrative, and the role of collective memory in building a sense of community and shared identity. Demonstrating the dialogic and interactional dimensions of meaning-making processes, this case study informs how we might theorize and understand the role of identity and narrative in the emergence and amplification of social movements.
ContributorsPaulesc, Julieta Cristina (Author) / Warriner, Doris S (Thesis advisor) / Matsuda, Aya (Committee member) / Prior, Matthew (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Social scientific scholarship has emphasized how parents’ undocumented legal status might influence the emotional, social, and economic well-being of mixed immigration status families, pointing to a greater need to better understand the lived realities of the undocumented population. Although Arizona is home to a large and growing number of undocumented migrants, a strongly anti-immigrant socio-political environment shapes the experiences and opportunities that migrants encounter. With an estimated 16 million people living in mixed-status families nationwide and over five million children under 18 living with at least one undocumented parent, deportability is an urgent social problem. This qualitative dissertation draws on narrative and discursive methods to shed light on the spatiotemporal dimensions of undocumented migrant mothers’ narratives, with a particular focus on the understudied area of how identities are constructed, performed and/or resisted in narratives of the future. Narrative inquiry is a useful method to explore issues of identity construction and negotiation in migration contexts. Theoretically, my approach leans on identity as a discursive practice, as contextualized and negotiated in storytelling. The study is further guided by a dialogic/performative approach to narrative. Analytic concepts, such as (im)mobility and imagination, and Bakhtinian theory of novelness, particularly dialogism and chronotope, also inform my approach to narrative analysis. Data come from sixteen hours of semi-structured interviews with seven undocumented mothers from Mexico who live in mixed-status families in Arizona. The findings show that the participants oftentimes felt at the bottom of the local social hierarchy due to their undocumented legal status. Furthermore, findings shed light on how the participants perceived, imagined, negotiated and sometimes resisted various social and spatial (im)mobilities in contexts of illness, loss, and grieving. The analysis also demonstrates how the participants navigate their spatiotemporal fragility through discourses of imagination and contrastive chronotopes as they raise their children and consider alternative timespaces for their future.
ContributorsTorres, Doris B (Author) / Warriner, Doris S (Thesis advisor) / Prior, Matthew T (Committee member) / O'Connor, Brendan H (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023